Over the last 10 years, IT has moved further and further outside the firewall. Starting with ASP (application service providers) and moving to multitenant SaaS (software as a service) on-demand applications, and now into cloud-computing environments, the status of on-premise IT has shifted from being a necessity to an option.
An interesting factor in this shift is the customer assumption that SaaS, like open source, has an assumed value, but ultimately, the fact that it's cheaper to run and manage is what will continue to drive adoption.
I had a good conversation at the SaaS Summit on Thursday with Treb Ryan and John Rowell, respectively CEO and CTO of OpSource, a provider of SaaS and Web applications for companies offering on-demand services.
The big question for me was, what is SaaS when cloud is all the rage? Is it a subset or just another classification for the same thing?
Ryan told me that "SaaS is the business version of cloud computing," meaning that cloud services such as Amazon.com's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) offer great value but lack features required in the enterprise. Service-level agreements and compliance are simple examples.
... Read moreThe 2009 SaaS Summit kicks off tomorrow at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. It's always one of my favorite events of the year, filled with information that you can actually use in your daily business life.
This year's agenda, focuses on the opportunities emerging from the depths of the current economic downturn for software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Cloud computing companies. The content will also address how businesses can take advantage of SaaS and cloud services to lower costs and increase productivity as IT spending remains questionable for the rest of the year.
I'll be there tomorrow to meet with the OpSource team and check out the Selling SaaS to the Enterprise panel. For more information visit the website.
You can follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
Join me and John Rowell from Opsource, Wednesday, July 9, 2008 9:00am PDT on a webinar discussing how the Cloud affects the Enterprise and vice-versa.
Learn about common concerns organizations face when incorporating SaaS applications into their growing enterprise architecture and how to make the transition from on-site to internet based applications.
As we Twitt-iots sit around bemoaning the fact that we can't send each other useless junk on a flaky service, I thought I would take this chance to address the notion that this message-scaling problem is new.
It's not. It's very common, and it can be solved.
Scaling a messaging platform is why IBM sells a boatload of MQ series, why the AMQP protocol was developed, and why JMS is nearly ubiquitous. Pretty much every large enterprise has similar scale issues related to messaging, especially in financial services. But they don't have downtime, and if they did as frequently as Twitter, the people behind them would all get fired.
This is a topic I actually know something about. (Disclosure: my company develops an open-source enterprise service bus, or ESB, called Mule.) All of our use cases involve some kind of complicated messaging architecture, whether it be Web-service based, publish and subscribe, one to many, direct connection, etc. And most deal with data transformations and a vast array of protocols.
In my view, what Twitter needs is to adopt a bus-type of architecture that separates the transport from the application and uses a middleman to process the transactions. This is a very common enterprise scenario that needs to be applied. This is what an ESB does.
One example in the Web 2.0 world is OpSource, which is delivering billions of transactions a day as an SaaS provider using the ESB at the crux of the transactions. This is much larger than Twitter and has actual revenue impact. Maybe OpSource can host Twitter?
While I was strolling through the SaaS Summit yesterday someone made the comment that the OpSource guys "could always become an events company if things went south with their core business" which I agree with. The event yesterday (and today) was great. Very well done and very professional.
I was on the Integration panel in the afternoon and I think I avoided doing too much damage to my fellow panelists who seemed intent on being living commercials for their companies.
A few interesting things I gleaned:
-Taleo is a very cool, fairly large public company that I had never heard of -In contrast to open source conferences (minus OSBC) where I feel very old, this was a much more gray audience
-Few people have figured out how to build effective SaaS businesses but more pieces are falling into place
I went to the MySQL booth and marvelled that they were giving away mints AND jelly beans, made some joke about telling Zack they were giving too much away and the guys at the booth were jerk-offs to me. I guess they don't have to bother being nice now that the Sun acquisition is complete.
UPDATED: I told Zack I wouldn't call his people jerks (or other names) without telling him first. I was seriously pissed when I initially wrote this. Maybe they were having a bad day. Or maybe they hate me. Who cares!
I am on the "Integration Behind the Fire Wall - Take II" panel tomorrow at 1:30pm at the OpSource SaaS Summit here in SF.
It should be a good one with panelists from SAP, Cast Iron and others. We'll be talking about the enormous burden of integrating enterprise apps with SaaS.
Whoever mentions this blog post will get a squeezy Mule until I run out of the few I can carry.
The SmoothSpan Blog has a very detailed article outlining the SaaS universe and the likelihood of dominant players taking on aggregation roles.
This is a segment ripe for consolidation--or maybe aggregation as users realize they are locked into individual SaaS apps.
OpSource acquired billing provider LeCayla earlier this month and odds are that won't be their last purchase. OpSource is in a unique position of having critical mass in the SaaS hosting space and there will be lots of companies that they see value in or can pick up if the company can't go it alone.
Taking the scale of Salesforce.com's user base out of the equation and the OpSource ecosystem is much more appealing, if for no other reason than the fact that OpSource can absorb acquried companies much quicker (thanks to their architecture that puts all the customers onto the Bus) something that Salesforce.com can't do easily.
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